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WORLDSTONE(1)             BSD General Commands Manual            WORLDSTONE(1)

NAME
     worldstone -- shell script to consistently execute benchmarks

SYNOPSIS
     worldstone [-s] [-n iterations] [-c command] [-p command] [-t tag]

DESCRIPTION
     The worldstone utility is a shell script and takes care of some of the
     grunt work around benchmarking, in order to make it easier to get
     consistent and comparable benchmark results. Its basic operation is:
     execute the precommand, then execute and time the command, and do this a
     set number of iterations, and record the times in a logfile.

     Its features are:

     -       It executes the precommand and command once without timing it in
             order to mitigate cold cache effects.

     -       It allows a precommand to run before the command, so that the
             initial state can be set up by the precommand without it being
             part of the timing (e.g. make clean).

     -       It redirects the stdout and stderr to /dev/null so that lots of
             output going over a network connection doesn't influence timing.

     -       It does a sync before running the timed command, and makes sure a
             final sync is part of the timed command, to make the i/o more
             consistent.

     -       It logs the times of each iteration in an easy-to-parse logfile.

     -       It tries to guess a sensible log file name based on the current
             git branch in /usr/src.

     The options are as follows:

     -s      If set, perform statistical profiling by invoking profile(1) and
             executing sprofalyze, suitable for feeding to sprofdiff. This
             requires building world with SPROFILE.

     -n iterations
             Set the number of iterations to perform, after the initial run.
             The default is 5.

     -c command
             Set the command to run to be timed. This is passed to sh -c, so
             shell constructs like loops etc. are okay to do. Default: make
             all.

     -p command
             Set the pre-command to run. This command gets run before the
             timed command in order to make the timed command get a consistent
             state before it starts.  Default: make clean.

     -t tag  Use the given tag name to modify the logfile that the utility
             uses to write its results in. The default is just 'time' plus the
             git branch you are currently on in /usr/src. In order for this to
             be useful you have to make sure the git branch you are on
             reflects the system you wish to benchmark of course.  The script
             checks /usr/src/.git even if you are outside the /usr/src
             hierarchy (such as in pkgsrc).

     The script executes the commands the set number of iterations,
     redirecting stdout and stderr to /dev/null, and records the timed results
     in the logfile tagged with the given tag.  worldstone executes time(1)
     with the -C option, resulting in printing the 64-bit cpu cycle counter
     for both HZ-independent high resolution and an easy way not to have to
     convert minutes and seconds to seconds when parsing the results.

     You can feed the two separate logfiles directly to ministat(1) to have it
     tell you the statistical properties of the two datasets, and judge
     whether there is a statistically significant difference.

ENVIRONMENT
     The default commands, i.e. make all and make clean, can be modified by
     supplying a MAKE environment variable, so e.g. MAKE=bmake worldstone
     still does something sensible by default in /usr/pkgsrc directories.

SEE ALSO
     ministat(1)

BSD                           September 22, 2011                           BSD
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO